


hush-a-bye, don't you cry

by Anonymous



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: ? - Freeform, Angst, Breathplay, Cryogenics, Dreams, HYDRA Trash Party, Humiliation, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Multiple Orgasms, Nightmares, Non-Consensual Oral Sex, Non-Consensual Somnophilia, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Rape/Non-con Elements, Rough Oral Sex, Scary Oral Sex, Spreader Bars, Tea, Unrealistic Sex, Violent Sex, minor semi necrophilia not quite, very degrading
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-11
Updated: 2016-07-11
Packaged: 2018-07-22 21:33:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7454671
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For a post on the trash meme: </p>
<p>Bucky wanted to go into cryo because he wanted peace and rest and to feel safe. Back with HYDRA, though, he was usually wiped before cryo, especially in later decades. Because of that, he went into cryo essentially a blank slate, and never dreamed. He would come out feeling disoriented, but otherwise well rested. Now, he's had two years of living on his own and remembering everything, and he just came out of a rather horrifying situation where he got his arm blown off AGAIN and Steve nearly died.</p>
<p>So instead of a nice, dreamless sleep, Bucky closes his eyes in cryo and drops right into trash nightmare land. Maybe the nightmares start out as actual memories of trash parties that really happened, but they quickly progress to something much worse...</p>
            </blockquote>





	hush-a-bye, don't you cry

**Author's Note:**

> Real sorry this is my contribution to the Bucky/T'challa tag.

“I want this,” Bucky said when Steve promised there were other ways, and in all of the people to leave Steve, Bucky’s the first to tell him to his face he wants to go.

He’s sleeping now, behind the glass. There’s mist on the wrong side of the pane, where Steve can’t wipe it to be sure that the dark hair and sunken face are Bucky’s, but he knows anyway. He saw the doctors put the tube in (Bucky didn’t even wince), and he watched the glass rise up around him, and he’s been standing here watching the light roll off the curved side of the cryo chamber for hours when suddenly it’s sunset, and there’s a tall woman in the doorway saying that his Highness is waiting to speak to Steve. 

Steve isn’t used to anybody’s Highness waiting on him, and truth be told, he doesn’t want to go. Every inch of him is tired, more tired than he’s biologically meant to be, and he wonders if that’s a mistake in Howard’s arithmetic after all these years or if he’s just that empty with Bucky a blank space again. A part of him hopes it’s the former.

“Tell him I’m coming,” he says. Where her voice echoed in the arched doorway like it came from a giant, his sounds weird; anemic, like it might not reach all the way across the room to her. She nods anyway, and turns to vanish again.

Beside him, Bucky’s eyebrow twitches. 

Steve’s been awake for over forty hours now, but he doesn’t need sleep the way he used to and he’s sure of this: Bucky’s eyebrow, a dark smudge behind the frosted glass, moved. Steve stares through the glass, rubs it stupidly like he’ll wipe through to the other side this time, but the faint line is still now, like it never moved at all, and maybe it didn’t. Maybe it’s eighty hours, not forty. He feels sick with embarrassment, suddenly; he jumped at that chance like he didn’t just promise Bucky, not two whole days ago, that he wouldn’t get dumb. 

_He wants this, you dumb lump._

He turns away before he can study the shadows again, and goes to meet his Highness. 

\- - - 

He’s dead from his ankles up. He can feel the cold; worse, he can hear it in the dull slap of skin as hands grab his legs, shoving, rearranging, and then the sharp, eerie thrust of weight somewhere deep inside him that echoes up to his head, the only bright, living part of him, waggling on the end of his body with every steady, painless jolt into his dead mass. 

“Jesus Christ,” a voice growls, and he hears the awkward shuffle of fabric and skin as the strong hands jerk his legs farther apart. “He’s a fucking nightmare like this. I thought I told you to warm him up.”

“You wanted him cold,” someone else says, mildly, and the first voice spits, hitches, sighs greedily as Bucky’s head rattles on the loose bed of his own hair. 

“Christ, _fuck_ ,” the voice repeats, and a hand presses down hard on the disjointed mass of nerves that is his shoulder coming alive again, “at least just—holy Christ, never mind, _fuck_.”

The cold is draining down through his chest, leaking out the corners of his mouth and his eyes and nose; he can feel it pooling between his legs, a limpid puddle slithering along his belly as nerves spark up and down his back. With every shake, he feels more: his cheekbone crushed against metal, hard dry fingers clenched at the crawling nape of his neck, the precarious slipping tilt of his body up towards the center of heat and pain that keeps shoving against him. It hurts. It feels wrong, and too much, but when he opens his mouth he only coughs pale, shimmering blood into the steel table; there’s no voice left in him. They took that away. 

“Jesus,” the heavy voice above him moans, “this, _this_ is why, fucking _God_ , this is why I hate him like this, the fucking _mess_ —” Something hard connects with Bucky’s temple, and he feels more than hears the noise that comes out from deep in his lifeless stomach. 

The voice laughs, and a warm hand reaches between his legs, pushing back against his instinct to curl inwards. “Behave,” says the owner of the hand, “we’re not having a repeat of last time.”

He tries to talk again, and pain bubbles up into his mouth, choking him. _Stop_ , he wants to say, but the weight slamming into him knocks air and time out of proportion; he can’t remember how to make words and the man behind him is grunting, sighing, smacking lips he can’t see and crawling untrimmed fingernails into his hair to tug hard, jerking a noise out of him that doesn’t sound like his own voice. 

“ _Please_ ,” it sobs. 

Time pauses; he’s on his back and there are dark beetle eyes crowding into his vision, bobbing and ducking and pressing so close he can taste them in the back of his throat: “What did you say?”

“No,” he croaks; it’s not an answer but it’s all he can think right now. “No, please.”

“Well, aren’t you a smart little machine,” the Commander snorts, “now that you’re done drooling on yourself.” His black eyes scan the body in front of him, and Bucky can’t help following his gaze, panic swelling in his belly when he sees he’s naked, white skin marked off with the shallow pink bands where the cryo chamber bit into him. On the flat ridge of his hip there’s the faint red outline of a hand; now that he’s looking at it he can feel the sting. He’s naked on a metal table, and the left side of him is yawning space where an arm should be, and as he stares down at himself he sees the Commander’s hairy hand reach lazily down to his limp cock and tug.

“Stop,” he chokes out, “don’t, stop it,” but he can’t move. He should be able to move. There’s nothing holding him down, but he’s trying and all he can do is pant while the Commander plays idly with his cock like he doesn’t know Bucky can feel it, like he can’t hear the desperation in Bucky’s voice when it starts to swell and jerk.

“This,” the Commander comments, “is the problem. When you thaw it out, it thinks it’s supposed to talk back.” His thumb slides over the head of Bucky’s cock, teasing everything harder, grinning when he sees the slow, horrible trickle of fluid start out from the slit. 

Bucky can’t breathe. His heart is pounding in his ears and his head is white friction and he’s praying with everything in him that he won’t come. He can make it through torture and he can shut off his brain and if he just doesn’t think, if he doesn’t breathe or think or pay any attention to the Commander’s hand and the relentless tickling heat building in his balls, then he can do this. 

He’s not supposed to be here. He can’t remember where he’s supposed to be, but it’s far away from here, and the Commander’s telling someone out of sight that you’ve gotta clean it out before you use it or it gets noisy, and he’s so hard in the Commander’s huge, slippery hand it’s like every nerve in his cock is exposed, just waiting for the next touch to send him over the edge, and he tries for a desperate second to hold his breath, like that’s gonna stop the inevitable. 

He’s supposed to be with Steve, he remembers, and in the tidal wave of panic that hits with that realization, he comes helplessly over the Commander’s hand and his own thighs. 

\----

Captain Rogers is tired. T’challa doesn’t have to be told to see it, traced into the stubborn corners of his mouth and roped around his slow feet, a heavy fetter he can’t loosen. T’challa thinks that he knows what it feels like to walk around with another soul weighing every step. 

The captain apologizes for being late, and he’s so young; even T’challa, young to be a king, can’t get used to it every time he speaks.

“You should rest,” he tells Steve, and Steve smiles, like he’s heard a joke. 

“I think Bucky’s resting enough for both of us,” he says. T’challa considers telling him that what his friend is experiencing is closer to death than to sleep, medically speaking, and decides against it.

“We’ll watch over him,” is all he says, and again, “rest.” 

Steve nods dumbly, chastised, and turns to go when he realizes there’s no more to be said. He pauses at the door, though, hesitating. 

“I think I saw him move.” 

That is enough to startle T’challa; he feels the spark of unease set off when Steve looks at him, because this isn’t supposed to happen, if it happens at all it means that something has gone terribly wrong. The process is simple enough, so simple that a single error means disaster to the system: the body slows to a fraction of itself, a chemical imprint so faint and yet so precise that it preserves life in the simplest possible terms, without motion or breath or thought. Any irregularity means that the imprint has been corrupted, and Steve Rogers is not a man who imagines things that are not there. 

But then—he’s standing in the doorway off-balance, like a nervous child waiting for reassurance that the nightmare was just a dream, and he’s so young, and so tired T’challa half expects him to fall down where he stands. 

“It’s nothing,” he tells Steve. “Get some sleep.”

\- - - -

The Commander jerks the last agonized spurt out of him and drops his cock, wiping come on the tender, red spot on his upper thigh. Somehow it’s bigger than before, deep purple and throbbing as the Commander’s rough hand kneads it carelessly. Bucky can feel the pain spreading like a poison up through his hip, rising to match the panic that’s swirling in his head. 

_This is a dream. This isn’t real. You made it up._

He tries again to curl up, like he can hide the shame of what he just did by rolling over to show his ass to the room, but the Commander grabs him in two places, hip and hair, and he can’t move. 

“Machine learning,” he says, “is a fucking myth,” and in one movement Bucky’s flat on his stomach, breathing the hot medical tang of steel and tasting his own blood where he bit down on his tongue, hissing as his oversensitive cock touches cold, bare metal. He tries to shuffle his legs together, a little shelter in himself. _It’s just a dream. It has to end soon._

The Commander’s laughing behind him, and the hands are back on his thighs, spreading them wide no matter how hard he kicks, and this time they run right up the insides of his legs, teasing at the vulnerable place in between so he whines and jerks even though the Commander’s barely touching him. That gets him another laugh, and a slap on the ass that he’s sure left a mark. 

“Bring me the bar, will you?” he asks someone out of sight. “This thing isn’t gonna stay still.” 

The footsteps don’t tell Bucky anything; neither does the lazy finger tracing a line up his perineum while the footsteps rustle around in what must be a closet. He tries to ignore that, gritting his teeth and focusing on something, _anything_ else. _Steve? Someone? Auntie Em?_

It’s when the cuff closes around his ankle that he remembers what this is, and by then it’s too late to fight: the Commander is already buckling the straps tight, leather biting blood just under his skin, and he can feel the unbearable airy weight of the bar between his legs, floating in midair like an invisible force field he can’t crush no matter how hard he writhes. Struggling only makes it worse, and before he knows it he’s twisted himself into a splayed crouch, knees spread wide and ass raised helplessly in the air. 

“Perfect,” someone says, and it’s not the Commander this time. Bucky can feel them, suddenly, all around him, watching and breathing and waiting. He’s not sure how many. He remembers a picture he saw once, when he was small, a lamb in the middle of a forest and a hundred wolves   
ringed about like dark, hungry trees. There aren’t a hundred here. Maybe ten. Maybe more. 

_Perfect for what?_

The finger that creeps inside him, teasing and searching, isn’t meant to ease his way, Bucky knows: it makes his stomach twist, makes him jerk and keen and scramble helplessly to get away, only to slip face-first onto metal. He yelps, tastes blood, and hears the chorus of laughter from the wolves. 

It starts then, and it isn’t a dream, this is happening—has happened—always happens. He knows this moment, when the Commander’s cock shoves inside him so mercilessly he’s sure it’s drawn blood, when sharp nails twist in his hair and bite his hips, when he can hear the men around cheering, yelling suggestions he prays the Commander won’t hear, all to the low accompaniment of sly zippers and swallowed groans. This happens; it happens every time, he doesn’t like to think about it but he knows, just like he knows he’ll probably come again before it’s over, because he always does. The tech will wipe him down and the chair will tear him apart and he’ll be clean again, until the next time. Till then he just has to wait. 

Only—it must be a dream after all, because it doesn’t end when the Commander shudders and yells and Bucky feels something hot and slippery burst inside of him, the way it usually does. He’s trembling and dizzy and there’s precome dripping along his swollen cock, puddling between his legs, because he can’t control himself, because he’s a slut, an animal, a dog so desperate to please his masters he’ll make a mess of himself trying, he _knows this_. But the techs don’t come.

_This isn’t the way it happened._

Someone else grabs him, flips him over on his back so he’s slipping in his own mess; he can’t see the man’s face but his hands are quick and sweaty, hands that knows where they’re going. One lands on his hip, the other on his throat, and someone’s weight rocks into him, bucking him backwards on the table. Black stars crack his vision, but he doesn’t pass out. He’s waiting for it, straining for breath as the hands steady him, but it’s as though he’s floating just below the surface of a deep black lake, too heavy to float but too rotten to sink. Something’s buoying him up, holding him as surely as the hands on his thigh and throat, and it won’t let him drown. 

The man comes inside him, warm and sudden, stinging as he pulls out. He takes his weight off Bucky’s throat and suddenly there’s light again, oxygen searing down his windpipe as he coughs and hisses, turning onto his side to spit and gasp into the sweat-slicked metal. 

The next guy isn’t content to hold him down and rut till his finds his own satisfaction. He wants something new, something more. He hauls Bucky up by the hair at the back of his neck while Bucky’s still gulping for air, and snaps at him to shut his mouth. 

“If I wanted to listen to you whimper, I’d have told Rumlow to bring out the stun baton. That’s not,” he adds in a pointed tone, “a fucking suggestion.” His voice is high and lazy, like he’s too good to be here but while he’s around he might as well take in the show, and the hand he runs down Bucky’s bare back feels smoother than the others. 

It traces the lines of tension in his shoulders and the painful knots of his spine, prodding curiously at the bruises left on his hips as it works its way down to grasp his thigh. He’s being repositioned; one leg and then the other lifted and guided into place, a firm hand on his stomach smoothing his spine up into the perfect shape, and the voice commands, “Stay.” 

Bucky freezes, focuses all his energy on willing his muscles into stillness, but it’s a lost cause. He’s shaking, all the more in this vulnerable position, with his knees spread wide and his arms supporting the weight of his aching chest. The more he tries to hold still, to do as he’s told and make the whole thing end quicker, the worse the shaking gets. 

His cock’s still hot and stiff between his legs. Ten minutes of suffocation should have wilted it but he can feel without looking that it’s only made him harder. Every second, he expects the man’s soft hands to find it, but it doesn’t happen; he runs his fingernails down the back of Bucky’s thighs, prods at the soft, naked arches of his feet, even traces the tense line of his jaw, but his fingers never get closer to that burning, desperate place than when he took hold of his legs to mold him into place. Bucky feels wet underneath his fingers and sees that he’s drooling with anticipation, but the man doesn’t seem to notice the obvious, humiliating fact.

“Stay still,” the man barks, and Bucky realizes he’s been shifting his hips unconsciously, twisting helplessly in midair to find a bit of precious friction. He tenses up, and lets the hands guide him back to the shape he should be.

“They told me you’d listen,” the voice breathes in his ear. “They told me you were better than this. They told me this one, this one is the best.” He grabs Bucky’s hair and twists, commanding. “Are you the best, _soldat_?”

Bucky tries to speak, but his voice is gone; he nods, feeling stupid, an animal too horny to think, dumb in every sense of the word. The hand in his hair releases, satisfied. 

Then there’s nothing. No touch, no sound; a cloud of absence, like the strange interstices between waking and sleep, sleep and death. His ears are full of his own breathing, fast and   
hideous, and though every nerve in his body is prickling with desperation he doesn’t dare move. 

“If you’re the best,” the voice tells him, “you’ll do as you’re told.”

His mouth moves without his knowledge; he feels tongue and lips shape the words that spill onto the air, but they aren’t his: “ _Ready to comply._ ” 

\- - - - -

The night air moves, but she knows everything in it: she knows every inch of this palace, every sound in the jungle outside. She could follow the path of a beetle over the peaked roof without moving from where she stands. 

In the tiny room, the only sounds are her steady breathing and the mechanical undertone of circuity. There’s a man in the room, but he isn’t breathing. The machine holds his breath for him, trapped in ice and code, till the time comes for him to wake. 

She glances at the clock; just shy of two. Straightening her spine from its stasis, she crosses the room to the monitor beside the glass chamber and checks the readings. All normal, down to the last digit: the soldier’s enjoying a sleep as sound and unshakable as the fortress they’re hidden in.

_Except._

She frowns, squints closer at the fourth column of the monitor, checks it again and sees the same thing. The reading’s spiking, not by one or by tenfold but by a quarter of a percent, a difference she’d barely glance at if this was anything but what it is, a man divided by himself, diminished to the furthest possible decimal point, so that a heart attack might echo up to the surface as the slightest whisper of pain. 

He’s dying in there. 

She presses a button, and the night takes up the alarm.

\- - - - -

“Again,” the voice says, and the soldier obeys. 

He doesn’t know how many times this is; he lost count, or maybe it never happened. There’s blood on the table, sticky and running, but he can’t remember where it came from. It’s far more than could have come from him, pooling under his legs and splattering in slow, soft gobbets on the spreading floor below. 

There isn’t a mark on him. 

His metal hand is soundless, curling around his limp, bleeding cock. He stares down at it, wondering; he thinks his fingers must have cut it earlier when the voice snapped _tighter_. He squeezes now anyway, biting down on a gasp and watching the blood ooze out between his fingers, bright against bright. He’s come a thousand times since the man with the gentle hands first touched him, but even now his cock jerks against the weight of his plated fingers, needy and oversensitive and already filling with the blood that dribbles out just below the slit. 

He’s being good. He’s obeying orders, the way he was built to. _This one—this one is the best._

“Up, soldier,” the voice commands, and he sways forward on his knees, chest heaving, presenting himself for inspection. He looks down at himself, taking in the long, lazy slits across his abdomen, the harsh pinmarks driving their way up and down the ridges of his hips and thighs. In the smoky corner of his vision, he can see the curling brands on his pectoral muscles, crisp and uneven against blank white skin. 

He stares down at his cock, wavering helplessly in mid-air, a dribble of precome already mixing with blood at the trembling tip. He goes to grasp it again, to relieve the hideous tension coursing down every nerve, but his arm won’t answer; he looks to his side, and it’s gone. 

He screams. It’s a voice that isn’t his, but somebody he knows, someone he killed so long ago he’s forgotten, and it hangs in the air around him for a single held moment that seems to last longer than he knows he’s screaming. Then pain falls on him like a weight; he’s pinned to the table, choking on the blood that bursts from his mouth, writhing as his cock slides against metal already slick with his own come. The pain comes again, electric, filling him, subsiding. 

He spits blood, sobs, and his hips jerk against the table, swiveling desperately for friction in the slippery mess beneath him. It isn’t enough, and he can hear someone jeering over the sound of his own frantic breathing. The wolves are back. There’s one breathing down his neck, paws heavy on his stinging shoulders: _can’t even come, look at it._

“Please.” He knows he isn’t allowed to speak, and he expects another wave of pain for this, for stealing the voice that isn’t his to beg like a hungry dog. “Please.” The pain doesn’t come, but neither does what he needs; he’s thrusting helplessly, rocking and twisting, and blood is creeping down his thighs and up his neck, teasing and itching and sticking in his throat as he begs, please, _please, PLEASE_ with the last of the breath he has left—as the pain rolls over him one more time.

\- - - - 

Steve doesn’t understand the numbers, only that they’re bad. They’re very bad. The technicians who wiped Bucky down and stood him in the case are working frantically over the machines, talking at a pitch Steve can understand even if the actual words pass over his head like so many screaming birds. 

“What happened?” he demands. T’challa is standing apart from the turmoil, as though he already knows there’s nothing he can do; he won’t meet Steve’s eyes. He’s watching the monitor next to the blank white tube that is Bucky, and Steve tries not to think, for the millionth time, how much the cryo chamber looks like a coffin upright. 

“What happened,” he asks again, and T’challa shakes his head slowly. 

“It hasn’t happened, Captain,” he says. “It’s happening now.” 

\- - - - 

It’s happening now. The thing its body’s been shuddering towards, swelling and aching and clawing at with sharp, heavy thrusts of its bleeding hips, it’s happening, and then it’s not, and then light shivers down its nerves, mixing pain and excitement and the sour crash of adrenaline building from deep inside its body, and it’s happening now, on the blood-drenched table with its face pressing into hot metal and a voice screaming with every frantic jerk of its hips as it spurts onto the table in violent, reckless bursts, the way it’s meant to. 

“Good,” a voice is crooning, soft and leering. “Performing perfectly, now.” 

It jolts. Cold presses its body down suddenly, sucking the breath away, tearing at its vision; then it’s lying panting in a bed of heat, sweat trickling into blood into semen, following the bolts of pain down its legs and into the glowing steel beneath it. 

“Can you hear me,” the voice calls. 

Its arm is lying pressed to its face, icy metal on inflamed, bloated skin. The world shifts and skews with each whirring roll of the machinery. 

\- - - - 

It’s no longer just the monitors betraying the deadly mistake. The motion around Barnes’s eyes is minute, but unmistakable: tensing, fluttering, rolling, never opening. T’challa watches a muscle at the corner of his left eye twitch, bizarrely sluggish yet insistent. 

T’challa doesn’t know whether this is a good sign, or the death throes in microcosm. Deep in Barnes’s cheek, something tugs stealthily, twisting the corner of his mouth into a false grin. 

“Can you hear me,” the technician repeats, cycling through English, Russian, Romanian, German. His voice is admirably level for someone trying to call down the tunnel to a dying man. 

“Why can’t they just wake him up?” Steve asks, and T’challa doesn’t have an answer for him. He suspects nobody does. 

“If you believe in a god, Captain, now is the time to pray.” 

\- - - -

Bucky tastes flat copper. He sees darkness. 

He swallows, dizzy with the effort, sick on the taste of thawing blood. He remembers a rusty pole under his tongue, laughter bouncing off shadows and snow behind him; he’s a child, tucked into an itchy wool hat. He swallows again; it’s sharp on the back of his throat, salty and cold. He’s being held in place by a heavy leather hand, or maybe it’s just fatigue. It’s impossible to tell. 

He opens his eyes. 

He’s in a white room, and the whirring surrounding him comes from a bank of machines, not from his arm; that ends in a dull black stump that sparks a memory somewhere not so deep in his brain. That’s how it was, before he fell asleep. Steve put his hand on it. 

There’s a man standing at the side of his bed, and his face tugs another nerve: he’s the prince, the man with the claws, the shadow that jumped at him and caught him and brought him here to sleep. 

Bucky expects him to speak when he catches his eye— “you’re awake,” “welcome back,” “let me tell you where you are,” maybe—but he doesn’t. There’s no reaction on his gentle face, and yet Bucky’s sure he sees him; his dark eyes are locked on Bucky’s. Bucky stares back, swallows, and for some reason he can’t look away. 

The man edges closer; he’s sitting on the edge of the bed now, and Bucky can feel a hand on his leg. Good to know there’s nerves there; good to know he’s not still dead from the waist down. There are patches of memory he tries to stay away from, where he wakes up and can’t walk—needs to badly, but can’t, because the ice is still stopping up every vein south of his ribs. He shakes his head, knocking that thought away. That doesn’t matter now. He’s alive now, and awake, and—

And _oh_. The man’s hand is in his hair now, stroking the tangles back, and his fingers are warm and steady. It’s a softer touch than Bucky expected from this man, and a shiver drops down his spine, dissolving into a comforting heat in his belly. The man keeps running his fingers through Bucky’s ratty hair without a word, like a mama would do, like someone Bucky can’t remember anymore. 

The same steady hands help him sit up, each tiny movement of his skeleton at once agonizing and luxurious. Every one of his vertebrae is a sharp, stinging reminder that he’s alive, and when he’s sitting up, knees akimbo, hands clutching at the sheets, he takes an awkward too-deep breath, huffing and coughing and closing his eyes so he can feel his lungs fill and empty, pushing at his ribcage, at his heart, at the stuffy film of cold layered over his body.

He opens them again, and the man’s still staring. 

Fingers run up the side of his thigh, down the other, and _shit_ , this is something that happens, it happened when he woke and in the van and it happened before, as far back as the war, he can remember sitting by a campfire outside a German forest rocking with the aftershocks of adrenaline, grinding softly against his pack, stumbling into the woods to bite his hand and stuff the other down the front of his khakis. He’d come in five seconds flat, three short jerks and a hot dribble against a tree trunk, then back to the fire to get warm again and sleep. 

He’s drifting, but his body pulls him back quick enough; the man’s _hand_ pulls him back, slipping over the drawstring of his pants and finding that stupid, desperate erection. Bucky hears himself moan. They’re not in Nazi Germany and he doesn’t care who hears. The hand’s back in his hair, gripping tighter this time—then seizing, suddenly, and Bucky has a moment to stare into T’challa’s bright, steady eyes before that hand is forcing him double, guiding his head into his lap. 

He can’t remember the prince undoing his pants, but he only has to open his mouth and he’s swallowing his cock, nose prickling with heat and salt. His breath’s stopped in his chest, but he doesn’t mind; he’s frantic, desperate, his fingers scrabbling for purchase on T’challa’s hips as he bobs and sucks and grinds against the mattress. He barely feels the fingers in his hair creep down his back, curling and biting, running down towards his hips and back up towards the nape of his neck with a sharp, breathtaking precision. 

His mind isn’t following as quickly as it should, because the sweat’s been trickling down his sides for a few minutes before he realizes there’s too much. He shifts, choking a little; he pulls off T’challa’s cock to gasp and glance back for an instant towards the damp patches on the sheets. 

It’s blood. 

He barely has time to register the harsh red against white before the hand on the back of his neck hardens, shoving him back down. It’s not gentle this time, and the hand doesn’t move; it holds him there, gagging around the prince’s cock, sobbing and fighting for air while the claws he never heard come out break through new skin, tearing him up from hip to shoulder, deeper than before; he must be gushing blood. He can feel it flow down his back, over his hip, he’s dying. His heart’s racing, and his throat keeps lurching and tightening around the huge, bitter length that seems to grow every time he tries to breathe. T’challa’s fingers open his back, laying bare kidney, lungs, his heart from behind. He feels a claw scrape his spine, metal on soft bone and nerve. 

_You’re awake._ He never said it. Bucky should have known then. 

He’s going to survive this, because he never woke up. His back will heal and his body will close and he’ll feel him come in the back of his throat, and in the moment he thinks he can’t endure another second the prince will lean down close to his face, and laugh, and ask him why he thought he’d ever be allowed to come back. 

\- - - - 

Bucky looks dead. Bucky _must_ be dead. 

The doctors have tried to explain it, but Steve isn’t sure he understood, or maybe they didn’t understand it themselves. Bucky’s not asleep anymore, but he’s not awake; he’s not dead, but there’s nothing in his cold white face or his motionless body that tells Steve he’s alive. He put a hand on Bucky’s wrist earlier, working himself up like a sick kid afraid to wake his mom in the night, and he didn’t feel a thing. 

They told him that’s normal. He didn’t ask what about this situation could possibly be called normal. 

So Bucky is alive, or not alive, or asleep, or something, and until someone can work out what exactly is happening they’ve laid him out on a bed and pulled a sheet up to his chest, tucking the wires and tubes out of his way as though he’s likely to be annoyed by them while he sleeps, or doesn’t. 

Something’s going to happen sooner or later—either Bucky will wake up, or he’ll start to stink. Either way, Steve’s sitting with him till it happens. T’challa brought a chair into the room, something deeper and softer than the metal one Steve started out on, and he has to admit he’s grateful. He doesn’t have a watch, but he thinks he’s been here over twelve hours. 

He talked to Bucky for the first few hours—old stories, jokes, reassurances, the kind of thing you’d say at a sick person’s bedside—but before long he lost the energy, or maybe just ran out of stories. Everyone always tells him he’s lived a long time, but when he looks at it himself his life seems like such a tiny thing. 

Since they laid him out on the bed, Bucky’s head has tilted ever so slightly away from Steve—not real movement, just gravity doing its work. There’s nothing behind that. Steve stares dumbly, and suddenly he’s angry, more than he can remember being, red and black filling up his chest and boiling behind his eyes. 

“Wake up,” he orders Bucky sharply. “I already did this once, Buck, wake _up_.” 

He’s not getting him back. He should have known the last few weeks were a fluke. Second chances aren’t real, or if they are they’re for other people. Better people. 

People like Bucky. 

“ _WAKE UP._ ” He’s yelling now, and he doesn’t care. He grabs Bucky by the shortened shoulder and jostles his body on the mattress and yells into his face. Someone’s going to come running; they’re going to pull Steve away and take him to his own little white room and he’ll be nowhere near Bucky when his heart stops, but it doesn’t seem to fucking matter anymore. He watched him die once already. He’s certain he can’t survive that again. 

“You’re not asleep anymore,” he tells Bucky; it’s what the doctor said, so maybe it’s true. “So wake up.” 

It’s not a cough or a frown or a flutter of the eyelids that makes Steve’s heart jump up into the region of his windpipe. In fact, it’s nothing like he’d imagined it. Bucky doesn’t open his eyes, or groan; there’s no indication he’s really heard anything Steve’s said, though Steve’s pretty certain everyone else in a five-mile radius heard him. 

It’s nothing like that. It’s just a long line of drool, creeping out from the corner of Bucky’s mouth. Steve watches it trail down his cheek, through week-old stubble, and soak into the pillow beneath him. While Steve stares, the wet patch grows to a spot the size of a dollar coin. 

“Bucky?” he asks, and then— _then_ —comes the cough. 

\- - - - 

He’s lying on his side in a bed; Steve’s making tea in a tiny oven built into the wall. Bucky wanted to tell him not to make tea in an oven, but he didn’t have the energy, and Steve seems to know what he’s doing. 

He sees Bucky watching him, and looks over. “You’re awake,” he says. 

He’s been saying that every time Bucky drifts, ever since he sat up into Steve’s arms choking on his own spit and asked, “Really?” when Steve told him. He can’t quite remember why it’s so important to be sure, but when Steve reminds him— “You’re awake now, it’s okay”—relief spreads through his body and he can breathe a little freer than before. 

Steve sits down in the heavy chair beside the bed, holding out a mug that, to Bucky’s surprise, has steam rising out of it.

“Here you go,” he says, and Bucky pushes himself up as best he can to take an awkward sip while Steve holds the cup steady with both hands. He lies back down on the pillows gratefully, dizzy with just the effort of that little movement. 

They told him there was a malfunction—that the machine went haywire, that his heart started acting up, or something else he can’t understand. A doctor with a very serious eyebrow told him that he had seven heart attacks before they brought him out, and to be honest, Bucky feels like it. He’s not sure he’ll ever be able to stand up again. He’s not sure he’ll want to. 

There’s something heavy tugging at the back of his mind, something he can’t get a grip on. He thinks if he’d tried when he first woke up, he might have known what was bothering him, but it’s been over a day now, and it’s gone, maybe forever. Or maybe it’ll be back the next time he falls asleep; he isn’t sure. If there’s one thing he’s learned in the last seventy years, it’s that he can’t trust his mind to do what he expects it to. 

In the meantime, though, he’s got Steve, and Steve made tea in an oven. He offers the cup to Bucky again, but Bucky shakes his head. That’s enough for now. 

“You’re awake,” Steve reminds him again, and Bucky nods. He knows. He’s been pinching his side to be sure of it, underneath the blankets; when he runs his fingers along his ribs he can feel the little crescents of dried blood climbing down his side. They’re still here, which means he’s still here. Which is good. 

Steve’s hand brushes his hair, combing back the tangles stuck to his forehead, and for some reason Bucky stiffens. There’s a cold seeping up from his chest, a weight growing and turning, and the shadow at the back of his mind moves and twists. 

“Don’t,” he says, shortly, and Steve takes his hand away. Bucky thrusts his hand under the covers, tugging up his shirt, his fingers tracing the Braille on his ribs, each tiny nick stinging with sweat as his fingers press against the cut. 

“I’m sorry,” Steve says, simply. He’s still holding the mug of tea, but the steam’s died down now. Bucky notices. Bucky doesn’t let these things slide. 

He digs his thumbnail into the soft skin above his hip, staring blankly up at the wall behind Steve’s shoulder. The shadow’s passing. It has to. 

“I’m awake?”

Steve smiles.


End file.
